Aging & Wisdom Quote by Bede Griffiths

For a celibate cleric to speak of sex at 86 is either a scandal or a confession of intellectual honesty; Griffiths makes it the latter, and that choice is the point. He doesn’t frame sexuality as conquest or regret, but as a “dimension” - a terrain of consciousness he’s “rediscovering,” as if desire were less a biological itch than a kind of spiritual sense organ. The line quietly refuses the usual religious binary: sex as temptation versus sex as sacrament. Instead, it lands in a third register where eros is information, not merely danger.

The subtext is a late-life pivot away from the ascetic ideal that defines masculinity through control. “Discovering the feminine” is loaded language for a clergyman: it gestures toward Jungian anima, Marian devotion, and the gendered metaphors of mysticism, but it also risks sounding like essentialism. Griffiths uses that risk strategically. He’s not announcing a change in identity so much as a change in perception: the “feminine” as what his formation taught him to bracket - receptivity, embodiment, relational knowing - now returning as a long-delayed literacy.

Context matters. Griffiths was a Catholic monk steeped in interfaith dialogue, especially Hindu-Christian synthesis, where sexuality and spirituality are often discussed as energies to be integrated rather than repressed. “Opening itself up to me” is almost comic in its gentleness: a man nearing death describing desire not as a last flare-up, but as a door finally unlatched. The intent isn’t provocation; it’s a critique of how long a life can be spent searching for wholeness while mistaking numbness for virtue.